Since 1929, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) has been rewarding what it considers the best cinematic offerings of a given year with what are now known as the Oscars. These have become the most prestigious and coveted awards not just in Hollywood, but in the entire film industry. However, that doesn’t mean that every Oscar-winning film is great. In fact, some aren’t even good.
Even though more often than not, films that are rewarded with an Academy Award are serviceable, at the very least, there are more than a few Oscar winners that range from lackluster to absolutely abysmal. From modern failed blockbusters to some of the pretentious slop that the Academy loved to reward back in the ’30s, when they were still finding their footing, these are the worst of the worst when it comes to Oscar winners.
15
‘Disraeli’ (1929)
Won: Best Leading Actor (George Arliss)
At the third Academy Awards in 1930, George Arliss became the first-ever actor to win an Oscar for a remake, as well as for reprising a role. He did so for playing British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in Disraeli, a remake of the 1921 silent film of the same title, itself an adaptation of a Broadway play.
Disraeli was hugely praised upon release, but almost 100 years later, it has aged rather poorly. Arliss is admittedly fantastic in this early talkie, but nothing else holds up. The actors talk, sure, but they’re not really saying anything of value, and the story is about as by-the-numbers as biopics get. There’s historical significance in this picture, but that’s about it.
14
‘The Golden Compass’ (2007)
Won: Best Visual Effects
Philip Pullman‘s His Dark Materials novel series is amazing, so it deserved a movie adaptation far better than whatever The Golden Compass was. But aside from being a terrible adaptation that waters down the source material’s every complex theme and story beat, this is also a pretty bad movie overall, no matter how you slice it.
The movie’s visuals are phenomenal and definitely deserving of their Best Visual Effects Oscar. That’s a relief, because visuals are all that The Golden Compass has going for it. The movie has no bite, no heat, and none of the boldness that makes the books it was based on iconic. It tries to do too much, yet it also has nothing to offer.
13
‘The Wolfman’ (2010)
Won: Best Makeup
Back during Hollywood’s Golden Age, Universal Pictures ruled the horror genre with its now-iconic monster pictures. Years later, they’ve repeatedly tried—and often failed—to re-capture that same magic. One of their most notorious failures was 2010’s The Wolfman, a movie with a troubled production that unsurprisingly resulted in a fittingly disappointing film.
The visual effects are fantastic, and the makeup was definitely deserving of its Oscar victory, but the film itself is no good. There’s no true horror or even suspense here, but rather a tone so bland and an atmosphere so lacking that it almost feels like an achievement. It’s by no means an atrocious werewolf movie, but it’s also definitely not among the best.
12
‘One Night of Love’ (1934)
Won: Best Music (Scoring) and Best Sound Recording
A romantic musical set in the opera world, One Night of Love has none of the complexity or entertainment value of an actual opera. Though its audio recording system was so groundbreaking that it earned Columbia Pictures an Academy Scientific and Technical Award, the film has overall aged like milk.
There’s some beautiful singing, and the movie’s historical importance on the technical side is undeniable, but One Night of Love has very little to offer modern audiences. It’s incredibly clichéd, its character dynamics are disturbing at best, and the story lacks anything that would make anyone not get bored to death nowadays.
11
‘The Iron Lady’ (2011)
Won: Best Leading Actress (Meryl Streep) and Best Makeup
Margaret Thatcher is, to say the least, one of the most divisive — if not downright despised — public figures in British history, so it probably wasn’t the best idea to make a film that celebrated her as a flawed hero. Nevertheless, that’s precisely what The Iron Lady went ahead and did. It’s a biopic about an elderly Thatcher talking to the imagined presence of her recently-deceased husband, grappling with his death while scenes from her past life intervene.
The movie ended up winning two Academy Awards. One for its makeup work (a well-deserved victory, frankly), and the other for Meryl Streep‘s performance as Thatcher (a much less deserving win). What, from the premise alone, could have ended up being one of the most unique biopics of the 2010s instead ended up doing the blandest, least politically critical job it possibly could have. Its Oscar wins weren’t travesties, all things considered, but they also don’t make it any better a film.
10
‘The Nutty Professor’ (1996)
Won: Best Makeup
Eddie Murphy was one of the biggest comedic stars of ’80s cinema, which made it even sadder when the quality of his work started to fall off during the mid-’90s. By the time The Nutty Professor came around, it was clear that something about the actor’s career choices had changed. It’s about an overweight yet good-hearted professor who takes a special chemical that turns him into the slim but obnoxious Buddy Love.
All in all, Murphy does a pretty solid job with the material he’s given, getting to play a surprising number of characters in all sorts of impressive makeup and prosthetics. It was precisely a Best Makeup award that the film ended up getting, and although some might consider this one of the least-liked Oscar wins purely because it makes it so that such a bafflingly childish and silly movie can be called “Oscar-winning,” the makeup is something that definitely can’t be criticized.
9
‘Earthquake’ (1974)
Won: Best Sound and Special Achievement Award for Visual Effects
One of the worst disaster movies of the 20th century, Earthquake is a huge ensemble film featuring actors of the stature of Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, and George Kennedy. It’s a dark comedy about various interconnected stories of people struggling to survive when an earthquake of unimaginable magnitude hits Los Angeles.
The sets are great, and the visual effects (which earned the movie a Special Achievement Oscar) are even better, but technical excellence is pretty much the only thing that Earthquake has going for it. There’s not much charm in watching these huge stars playing clichéd characters walking around destroyed sets, servicing a horribly melodramatic narrative. Everything is one-note, which immediately renders the stakes pointless.
8
‘Army of the Dead’ (2021)
Won: Oscars Fan Favorite
For the 2022 Oscars, the Academy introduced a Fan Favorite category where fans could vote on social media for their favorite film of the year. The fact that the category never came back (and perhaps never will) is pretty telling. The winner ended up being Zack Snyder‘s Army of the Dead, a zombie heist film where, following a zombie outbreak in Las Vegas, a group of mercenaries ventures into the quarantine zone to pull off the greatest robbery in history.
Zack Snyder definitely has worse movies, but that doesn’t at all mean that Army of the Dead is anything less than mediocre. Terribly overlong, lacking in creativity, and an attack on the senses with its CGI-heavy action, it has plenty of fun moments and cool genre twists going for it, but the cons somewhat outweigh the pros. There was more than enough backlash against the Fan Favorite category, making Army of the Dead an Oscar winner, that the Academy canceled the category for 2023.
7
‘In Old Arizona’ (1928)
Won: Best Leading Actor (Warner Baxter)
The second-ever Academy Awards had plenty of questionable winners, but few have aged worse than the Western drama In Old Arizona. It’s about a charming, happy-go-lucky bandit from Arizona playing cat-and-mouse with the sheriff that’s trying to catch him, all while he romances a local beauty. The movie’s sole Oscar win came for Warner Baxter’s brownface performance as the protagonist, the Mexican outlaw Cisco Kid.
According to Letterboxd, this is one of the worst movies that have ever won an Academy Award. Aside from Baxter’s campy performance aging like milk, In Old Arizona presents pretty much all the problems that a lot of early talkies had: It can’t quite figure out how to execute its genre with sound, the acting is a cringey relic of the past, and everything about the story feels fake and over-the-top.
6
‘Cavalcade’ (1933)
Won: Best Picture, Best Director (Frank Lloyd), and Best Art Direction
As the Academy was just figuring out the Oscars’ rules and what kinds of artistic merit they wanted to reward, the ’30s had more than a few Oscar winners that were, to be kind, quite bad. This includes Best Picture recipients like Cavalcade, a drama portraying the triumphs and tragedies of two English families from different social classes between 1899 and 1933.
One of the worst Best Picture winners of all time, Cavalcade is painfully boring, uncomfortably mawkish, and really poorly paced and written. There is some merit in its cast, its visuals (it also won Art Direction), and even in Frank Lloyd‘s direction here and there (he won Best Director), but the themes are so infantilizing and on-the-nose, the drama is so exaggerated, and the characters are so uninteresting that all of its strengths pale in comparison to its weaknesses.